G.C. Waldrep’s first book of poems, Goldbeater’s Skin, won the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry, chosen by Donald Revell. This was followed by two chapbooks, The Batteries (New Michigan Press, 2006) and One Way No Exit (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008), and three more full-length collections, Disclamor (BOA Editions, 2007), Archicembalo (Tupelo Press, 2009) and Homage to Paul Celan (Marick Press, 2010). His nonfiction book Southern Workers and the Search for Community (Illinois, 2000) examines the lives of textile workers during the early twentieth century. Granted a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007, he has also received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Campbell Corner Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, along with a Pushcart Prize. He holds degrees in history from Harvard and Duke and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa, and he teaches at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. Listen to G.C.'s wonderful feature on National Public Radio.
Born and raised in Wisconsin, Jim Schley moved to New England in the mid-1970s to attend Dartmouth College, where he majored in Creative Writing and Native American Studies. He earned a Master of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and for many years worked as a literary editor and toured extensively with experimental and activist theater companies, including the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater, the Swiss ensemble Les Montreurs d’Images, and Flock Dance Troupe. He is former co-editor of New England Review and editor of the anthology Writing in a Nuclear Age and of more than a hundred books on a diversity of subjects. After a sudden change of fortune he became an extreme freelancer and had more than twenty part-time jobs in one year, an experience described in an essay written for Newsweek magazine (pdf here). His poems and essays have been featured in Ironwood, Crazyhorse,Rivendell, and Orion, on Garrison Keillor’s radio show “The Writer’s Almanac,” in Best American Spiritual Writing, in a chapbook, One Another (Chapiteau, 1999), and now in a full-length book of poems: As When, In Season (Marick Press, 2008). An associate member of the journalists’ collective Homelands Productions, he is also Managing Editor of the literary book publisher Tupelo Press and he teaches at Community College of Vermont. Jim lives with his wife and their daughter in a house they built themselves on an off-the-grid cooperative.
Video
Interview - WUWM: Lakeshore Radio
Jim Schley tells Bonnie North about his poems and how he writes for the ear.
Reviews
“I like these poems immensely. What Schley has done is to reinvent the ode, especially in the nine poems for the muses. Prosodically he's discovered an odic tone, grave but graceful, imaginatively objective. It's extremely effective, and it tokens a very large degree of literary depth and experience.” — Hayden Carruth
APR11Marick Press Spring 2009 Launch April 11, 2009 2:00pm - 5:00pm Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Featuring poetry translators and writers William Rowe, Raul Zurita, Piotr Florczyk, David Matlin and the kick-off for the Marick Press Translation Series.
